The operation of the hardware, communications networks, software, and data storage used to support businesses and other organizations is critical to the businesses and organizations that rely on this infrastructure. Such enterprise systems are often the lifeblood of businesses large and small, educational institutions, governmental agencies, and the like. These systems are required to support the needs of the enterprise at the hardware level, to provide internal and external networking needs, to support various software capabilities, and to provide back-end data storage solutions. For an enterprise system to be effective and useful to an organization, it must provide all of these capabilities in a secure, reliable, stable, and scalable infrastructure that offers a high level of performance for users inside and outside of the organization.
There are significant challenges in designing and implementing enterprise systems that meet these needs for businesses and other organizations. For instance, enterprise systems often include various hardware and networking devices having different manufacturers, configured at different times and in different situations, and operating under different conditions in different geographic locations. Many enterprise systems also combine legacy hardware and software systems with newly implemented systems, causing potential issues for capability, security, and reliability. Moreover, many such systems are required to support an enormously diverse set of functionality within their respective enterprises. The hardware, communications networks, software, and data infrastructure of many enterprise systems are responsible for housing and supporting different departments within the enterprise, and providing services for different users (both internal and external to the enterprise) operating different user devices in different networks, and having different roles and levels of access within the system.